Changes in relative value

Posted on July 7, 2009 by paulmcl

It’s interesting how the relative values of things change over time. Agatha Christie, looking back on her early life, remarked that she “couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car.” I assume that by the time she died she drove but had no servants, like most of the rest of us.

One of the biggest drivers of changes in relative values has been the exponential improvement in semiconductor technology due to Moore’s law. Even those of us in the business underestimate it. People just aren’t very good about thinking about exponential change. I can remember running the numbers and working out (a long time ago) that we should have workstations that ran at 10MIPS, with a megabyte of memory and 100 megabytes of disk. What didn’t even occur to me was that these would not be refrigerator-sized boxes, they would be notebook computers; or even Palm Pilots. And a high-end 1 BIPS “supercomputer” with 16 gigabytes memory and a 2 terabyte disk would have seemed totally unbelievable to me, even as I read the numbers off the graphs. But that’s what I’m typing this blog entry on.

If you are not in a business where exponential change is the norm, people find it really had to think about. For example, in How laypeople and experts misperceive the effect of economic growth people were asked what would be the overall increase in national income in 25 years if it grew at 5% per year. Over 90% underestimated and only 10% of them were even within 50%. Surprisingly, the experts weren’t much better than the laypeople. Quick, what is the percentage increase? See the end of the entry for the answer.

If the timescales are extended more then the numbers become even more dramatic. Alex Tabarrok in his TED talk shows that if the world GDP continues to increase at 3.3% per year for the rest of this century (below what it has been running at) then the average per capita income in the world will be $200,000. That’s the world average, not the US which should be in the millions. Our great-grandchildren will be much richer than us (if we manage to avoid catastrophes like blowing up the world).

However, there is also a problem with our thinking when going the other way. Those of us in electronics and semiconductor tend to think other industries are basically like ours, with R&D driving an underlying exponential growth and thus the accompanying fast upgrading of old equipment. Battery technology, for example, doesn’t increase exponentially in line with Moore’s law. It would be great if an AA battery could contain 1000 times as much power as it could back in 1990, let alone a million times as much as it held in 1970. You’d only need one for your Tesla roadster.

Our cell-phones don’t last too long, not because they break but because the new ones are so much more powerful. So we junk them after a couple of years, along with our computers. But that’s not true for cars. No matter what great new change in cars happens (better MPG, lower emissions, super airbags, whatever) then it takes 20 years for most cars to get it. Many of the cars that will be on the road in ten years are already on the road today. Power stations, bridges, railroads, aircraft are all on even longer timescales. For example, I just looked and over 60% of all Boeing 747s ever built are still active, including some that first flew in 1969 (complete list is here).

When part of life improves exponentially and part doesn’t is when we get the type of dissonance that Agatha Christie experienced from unexpected changes in relative costs. Amazingly, and luckily, disk drive capacity has improved even faster than Moore’s law even though it depends (mostly) on different technology breakthroughs. But things involving large amounts of physical stuff, like metal, just can’t change very fast. Henry Ford would be amazed at various features of our cars, but he’d still recognize them. Early computer pioneers wouldn’t have a clue about a microprocessor.

The answer to what would be the overall increase in national income if it grows at 5% per year for 25 years is about 250%. A good rule of thumb everyone should know is that if something increases exponentially (compound interest) by x% then it takes 70/x years to double. So in this case it will double in 14 years and almost double again in 28 years (so about 3.5x in 25 years, which is a 250% increase).

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Application engineers

Posted on July 4, 2009 by paulmcl

Application engineers are the unsung heroes of EDA. They have to blend the technical skills of designers with the interpersonal skills of salespeople. Most AEs start out as design engineers (or software engineers for the embedded market). But not all design engineers make it as AEs, partially because, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, not all design engineers have good interpersonal skills! There’s also another problem, memorably described to me years ago by Devadas Varma: “they’ve only been in the restaurant before; now they’re in the kitchen they’re not so keen on what it takes to prepare the food.” Being an AE means cutting more corners than being a design engineer, and some people just don’t have that temperament. An AE usually has to produce a 95% solution quickly; a design engineer has to take whatever time it takes to produce a 100% solution.

AEs have a lot of options in their career path. As they become more senior and more experienced they have four main routes that they can take. They can remain as application engineers and become whatever the black-belt AEs are called in that company, be the guy who has to get on a plane and fly to Seoul to save a multi-million dollar renewal. They can become AE managers, and run a region or a functional group of AEs. They can move into product marketing, which is always short of people who actually know the product. Or they can move into sales and stop resenting the fact that when the deal closes, for which they feel they did all the work, the salesperson makes more than they do (and usually discover sales is harder than they expected).

In a startup, in particular, the first few AEs hired can be the difference between success and failure. The first release of a product never works properly, never quite matches what the market need is and is simply immature. The AE has to keep the customer happy by substituting their own expertise for the deficiencies of the tool while at the same time conveying back to engineering the improvements that are required. Most startups are attacking some sort of walled city, in the sense that there is an incumbent tool/methodology that is already in use, and the startup has to prove that they are better. In fact, not just better, compellingly better. The initial value proposition for most startups, when you look from the 10,000 foot level, is that it is riskier to stick with the existing methodology rather than trust the startup and try the new technology. Getting the customer decision-maker to that point is a mixture of technology (it has to work well enough) and trust in the AE (whatever happens, this guy is going to be there for me). Both factors have to be there to close those so-important initial orders because no matter how good the technology looks, the customer knows that the tool is not mature and might fail at any moment.

It’s been interesting looking at the downsizing of GM and Chrysler’s dealer network. It seems that part of the reason that car companies sell through independent dealers is that in the early days, nobody would buy a car from halfway across the country without a local guy in-town they trusted (and the situation got locked in place because those local guys became the richest people in town and got the states to pass laws that they could never be designed out; it almost every state it is illegal for GM to sell you a car directly). But that trust issue is just like the AE issue. Customers wouldn’t buy a car (tool) from a startup without a dealer (AE) too. It didn’t matter how good Ford’s car appeared to be in the showroom; in 1930, nobody trusted it not to break frequently (a good assumption) and they needed to trust that their investment was going to continue to be good.

AEs are really hard to find for a startup. Good AEs are pretty highly compensated, and so it is hard to match their salary, so it takes a lot of stock to makeup the difference. I did some consulting for a semiconductor equipment company once and they had an EDA product but they failed to hire a good AE since their own AEs were paid a lot less than a black-belt EDA AE and their salary policies were too inflexible. Good AEs are like gold and if you don’t have them you don’t get any gold.

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EDA’s next top blogger

Posted on July 2, 2009 by paulmcl

Denali’s competition for “EDA’s Next Top Blogger” is now open here. Please go there and vote for me (you are only allowed to vote once). There are two reasons I’d like you to do this. First, I’d like to win. But secondly I’d be interested in how many people read EDAgraffiti. Reed, the parent of EDN, has a policy of not releasing any page-view data outside of the company, so I have no idea of the size of my readership, let alone anything about who you all are. Voting closes the evening before the Denali party July 27th.

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Friday puzzle: monkeys

Posted on July 2, 2009 by paulmcl

It’s Friday on Thursday this week since Friday is a holiday for many people.

Last week’s puzzle was to determine the largest order of McNuggets that McDonalds cannot make up using their portion sizes of 6, 9 and 20. It’s possible in principle that the answer is unbounded, there might always be larger and larger impossible totals (as it obviously would be if the boxes were 5,10 and 20; you can’t make 1001). The numbers are small enough that you can solve it by simply calculating every total number until you have 6 in a row (at which point you know you can do all higher numbers since you just need to add boxes of 6). You’ll find the answer is 43 but that’s not very satisfying.

One thing to note is that McDonalds never needs to deliver more than one box of 9 (since 2 boxes of 9 is 3 boxes of 6) nor two boxes of 20 (since 3 boxes of 20 is 10 boxes of 6). So all possible numbers consist of zero or one box of 9, plus zero, one or two boxes of 20 plus some number N of boxes of 6. So there are 6 cases corresponding to (0,1) boxes of 9 and (0,1,2) boxes of 20.

0 boxes of 9 and 0 boxes of 20: total is 6*N
1,0: total is 6*N + 9 = 6*(N+1) + 3
0,1: total is 6*N + 20 = 6*(N+3) + 2
1,1: total is 6*N + 20 + 9 = 6*(N+4) + 5
0,2: total is 6*N + 40 = 6*(N+6) + 4
1,2: total is 6*N + 9 + 40 = 6*(N+8) + 1

Since all numbers from 0-5 occur as the remainder (the non multiple of 6 part) then high enough numbers are always possible, so the solution is not unbounded. The smallest number each line can deliver is when N=0. So the largest impossible number is achieved for each line at N=-1 (since -1 is the ‘largest number of boxes of 6 that is impossible deliver"). The largest of all these is obviously the last line, and if we set N to -1 we get 43, which is the answer.

Today’s puzzle is another one that requires you to look at factors. There are 1000 doors, all closed, along a very long hallway. In a nearby zoo there are 1000 mathematical monkeys. The first monkey is let out and opens every door. The second monkey is let out and goes along closing every second door: the 2nd, 4th, 6th and so on. The third monkey is let out and goes to every third door, closing the doors that are open and opening the ones that are closed (so the 3rd, 6th, 9th and so on). This goes on until the 1000th monkey is let out who just goes to the 1000th door and closes it (because it was open!). Which doors remain open?

Answer next week

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The Denali party

Posted on July 2, 2009 by paulmcl

As everyone in EDA knows, Denali has thrown a party every DAC for what seems like forever.

I had lunch last week with Mark Gogolowski and I asked him how the party came about. It started 11 years ago in 1999 at DAC in New Orleans. Denali wanted to have a party for their customers, but they faced a couple of constraints. They couldn’t compete with the big Cadence and Synopsys parties of that era, but on the other hand they knew that parties weren’t much fun unless they felt crowded. So they’d better invite more than just their (few) customers, especially since they needed to partner with all the simulation vendors, which meant all the big guys anyway. So invite everyone. Denali was under 10 employees in this era, not well-known, so they were more worried about holding a party and nobody coming than the opposite. But never underestimate the gravitational attraction of an open bar.

They expected about 100, maybe 150 people, would attend. One thing that they hadn’t anticipated was that the AEs from the big guys weren’t able to get into their own parties (the execs and sales guys went with their customers; AEs need not apply). So they showed up in large numbers. In the end well over 500 people came for at least some of the evening. At midnight the venue management told them they had to stop the party since the entire night’s alcohol budget was already gone. So they gulped, wrote a large check, and kept the party going for another hour. Shutting down a party as early as midnight in New Orleans and throwing their customers out didn’t laissez les bons temps roulez.

They realized that the party had been something special, and not just for their customers. The entire EDA community had shown up since Denali was neutral ground. Nobody from Cadence went to the Synopsys party and vice versa. But Denali, as the Switzerland of EDA, welcomed everyone. So next year, it seemed like it would be a good idea to do it again. And so it has been for many years.

I think it has turned out, somewhat fortuitously, to have been a great way to market themselves. We are in an era when it is really hard to get your name out in front of customers and partners. Denali doesn’t have that problem, plus it has a lot of goodwill from the entire EDA community since the Denali party isn’t exclusive. You don’t have to be a customer of Denali to get in; you can even be a competitor.

EDA idol is back again this year, along with a new “Community Superhero” contest. Another new thing this year is that they will be presenting an award for “EDA’s Next Top Blogger.” Of course, I have my own idea of who that should be. When I know how you can vote I’ll let you know!

So here we are a decade later. Everyone knows who Denali is, and they are a much bigger company now. They are still private, so just how big is largely a guess. But nobody cares about their revenue, the financial answer everyone wants to know is “how much does the Denali party cost?” I slipped a shot of vodka into Mark’s Diet Coke but he still wasn’t talking.

This year’s party is on Tuesday 28th July at Ruby Skye, 420 Mason Street. If you want to go you need to go here to pre-register. You won’t get in if you just show up at the door. A word of warning to out-of-towners looking at maps: there are two widely-separated Mason Streets in San Francisco. If you go to Marina Green you’ll have a nice walk but you won’t find any party.

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What will I want in my devices?

Posted on July 1, 2009 by paulmcl

Earlier this year, Paolo Gargini gave the keynote at DesignCon. He is an Intel fellow and director of technology strategy for their manufacturing group. He discussed three market enablers that would drive innovation and new products. He wasn’t being particularly Intel-centric but rather looking at the industry, since this was a keynote. Those three drivers were:

  1. Over a billion mobile Internet users
  2. 100 megabit/second wireless throughput
  3. Availability of over a billion transistors for portable chip designs.

The first interesting thing to notice about these three drivers is that they are all portable. Most silicon is going into one of two areas: portable devices, or server farms to form the compute cloud to talk to the portable devices. The first is much more important as a market since we all have a few portable devices of our own whereas we only make occasional use (“1,700,000 results in 0.22 seconds”) of the cloud. Enormous though those server farms are, with literally hundreds of thousands of servers, they are a shared resource. I remember reading somewhere (I can’t find the reference) that 2008 was the first year that more memory was shipped in cell-phones than in PCs. Even for memory, which has to be the majority of the silicon area in a server, the cell-phones contain more.

This is the end of a transition that has been going on for decades: that which was over the air is moving onto wires; that which was wired is moving onto the air. TV is moving from broadcast to cable (a transition that is largely complete). Telephone is moving from wire to wireless, a transition that is complete for anyone under about 30. My kids will never own a landline phone. When they move into an apartment they call the cable company for TV and internet; it doesn’t cross their mind to call the phone company, they’ve already got a cell-phone.

Internet is halfway through the transition. Within the home and office it has largely moved onto the air to wireless routers, but then goes over wire backhaul. With smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry and Palm Pre it is moving more and more onto the air completely, bypassing the router. It is not that far off that we’ll be dropping our home internet service since we get all that with our cell-phone and our laptops have it built-in too, or maybe they parasitically piggy-back on our phones. We could today with our iPhones if AT&T would let us, or if we spend about 5 minutes on the internet to find the right file to install to turn on tethering anyway. But even 3G data is still too slow for more than occasional use.

Next up is the netbook space (or whatever they end up being called, apparently "netbook" is a Psion trademark). If all the intelligence is in the cloud we can get away with lower-powered machines at our end. Although there are some interesting technical and business issues (Atom vs ARM, Linux vs Android vs Windows vs Symbian) I think the most interesting challenge is to decide how big we want our devices to be. I had a Palm for years, from back when they were still called Palm Pilot and were made by US Robotics. But I switched my Treo for an iPhone, but the screen is still too small for lots of things. I have a Kindle, great for reading but no color and a crappy keyboard. I have a MacBook but it is heavy and doesn’t fit in my pocket, and not a great screen for reading a book on. I don’t have the big KindleDX but the one person I know who does loves it. As screen and compute technology improve, the human interaction will be the limiting factor. Voice recognition seems to be pretty solid now, Nintendo Wii type technology works fine and there are demos out there of the same sort of thing without needing a controller at all, just a camera to watch you.

It is going to be fascinating to find out what I actually want.

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DAC

Posted on June 30, 2009 by paulmcl

The design automation conference (DAC) is later this month in San Francisco. Trade shows in general are probably gradually dying. I doubt we’ll be going to them in ten years time. But rumors of their death are somewhat exaggerated. DAC will probably be in San Francisco longer than the Chronicle.

Marketing in EDA these days is very difficult since the channels don’t exist in the way that they used to. Both EETimes and EDN have laid off their seasoned EDA journalists (Richard Goering from EETimes, now at Cadence, and Mike Santarini from EDN, now at Xilinx). The big EDA companies stopped advertising, which meant that the books couldn’t financially justify covering the industry. This was an unwanted side-effect of what was probably a reasonable decision. It’s never been clear whether advertising in the print edition was ever a good financial decision, but as more and more eyeballs went online it certainly got worse. Online advertising rates are just not as high, and there is a limit to how much a publication can annoy its customers with flashing adds, peel-back corners and stealing the screen for an enforced video.

So DAC is left standing as really the only marketing channel that works. It works in the sense that the major decision-makers from the EDA customers all come to DAC. DATE will presumably continue as a great conference but I doubt its tradeshow will recover as a must-attend event (and since it costs about the same as attending DAC, even a European EDA company will go to DAC if it can do only one). Japan still has its local shows too.

The big EDA companies are all going this year. I think it is foolish when they don’t attend. This is partially because they need to be seen to be good corporate citizens and not attending is unnecessary insulting to everyone else in the industry. They also tend to generate unnecessary bad publicity if they stay away. However, it is simply uneconomic for them to come in the strength that they used to (when I was at Cadence we’d have 5-600 people at DAC, running 50 demo suites). The “tax” from DAC itself, the conference center, the unions and everyone makes it a lot more expensive than running their own one-company shows.

Clearly, for the small companies, DAC is their one opportunity to get noticed other than people falling onto their website from a search engine. Not attending is tantamount to admitting you either no longer exist or are about to die. Envis, where I was recently interim CEO, has apparently pulled out of DAC. I don’t have an inside scoop on what it means but it doesn’t seem like it would be good.

If you work in marketing, DAC gives an interesting insight into the problems of GM or United Airlines. It is the one time when us silicon valley types have to get involved with union work rules. It costs more to get your equipment from the loading dock in the conference center to your booth space, than it does to ship it there (and this is true in Las Vegas or Annaheim, not just when DAC is local in San Francisco). You have to use a certain number of hours of labor whether you need it or not. You have to pay hundreds of dollars for someone to vacuum your carpet each day, since you are not allowed to do it yourself.

I said above that all the major decision makers from EDA customers are at DAC. Depending on your definition of “decision maker” that is anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred people. The whole of DAC is really for them. Whether the junior engineers and academics show up simply doesn’t matter that much (for the tradeshow, the accompanying conference would be nothing without academic participation).

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Licensed to bill

Posted on June 29, 2009 by paulmcl

As I’ve said before, in every sizeable EDA company that I’ve worked, a huge percentage, 30-50%, of all calls to the support hotline are to do with license keys. Why is this so complicated? Are EDA software engineers incompetent?

Most of these problems are not directly with the license key manager (the most common, almost universal, one is FlexLM). Sometimes there are direct issues because customers want to run a single license server for all the EDA tools they have from all their vendors, something that the individual EDA companies have a hard time testing since they don’t have access to everyone else’s tools. More often license problems are simply because licenses are much more complicated than most people realize.

All sorts of license problems can occur, but here is a typical one. The customer wants some capability and discusses with the salesperson who provides a quote for a particular configuration. Eventually an order gets placed and a license key is cut for that configuration. At this point, and only then, it turns out that the configuration doesn’t actually deliver the capability that the customer thought he’d asked for, and that the salesperson thought she’d provided. Something is missing. The customer calls support to either to report a bug or, if they realize what is going on, to try and get the specific license added. Often an option has been omitted from the configuration (such as a special parser) that everyone assumed was included, or assumed that it wasn’t needed, or that turned out to be bundled with some other capability in a mysterious way.

Digital Equipment, in the heyday of the Vax, actually had an AI program XCON salespeople had to use to configure Vax computers since otherwise they always had similar problems, although in the hardware domain. The order omitted a required cable, or overloaded a power supply or left out a software driver. Without this error being corrected, the delivered system could not be assembled in a way that would run. This is worse still in the hardware world since it takes from a couple of days to a couple of weeks to get a missing cable to the customer site. It can’t simply be fixed over the phone.

The fundamental problem is that it is hard to map capabilities that marketing wants to sell and price, into the actual control points in the software that permit or deny certain activities, and the ways in which the different components interact. Few people have a good understanding of this, and there is no correct answer to many of the questions.

Here’s an example. Should a long-running tool claim a license when it starts for an optional feature that might be required later? Or should it wait until it has run for hours and then fail if a license is not then available? Which inconveniences the user less? There are pressures on the vendor side to want to claim licenses as early as possible (so the customer needs to buy more licenses) which at least means that if a tool is going to fail due to lack of licenses, it does so immediately without having done a lot of wasted work, and in a part of the code where it is easy to handle. There are pressures from the customer side to want to claim licenses as late as possible (so they don’t get held for long periods when they are not being truly used) but also to expect that the tool will behave gracefully when their paucity of licenses comes to light and the run is deep in the innards of the tool when it finds out it cannot continue.

Interactive tools are worse still. Do you claim a license in order to show the capability on a menu? Or do you show a menu item that may fail due to lack of a license when you click it? Do you behave the same if the customer has licenses but all are currently in use, versus the customer not having any licenses to that product at all?

None of these problems typically affect the engineers developing the product or their AEs. Usually all employees have a “run anything” license. The licenses issues often only come to light when customers run into problems. After all, they may be the only site in the world running that particular configuration. Some testing can be done easily, but exhaustive testing is obviously impossible.

EDA companies want to create incremental revenue for new capabilities, so they don’t want to simply give them to all existing customers even though they may want to make sure that all new customers are “up to date.” This drives an explosion of license options that sometimes interact in ways that nobody has thought of.

Until some poor engineer, in the middle of the night, tries to simulate a design containing two ARM processors. That’s when they discover that nobody thought about whether two ARM simulations should require two licenses or one. The code claims another license every time an ARM model is loaded, in effect it says two. Marketing hadn’t considered the issue. Sales assured the customer that one license would be enough without asking anyone. Nobody had ever tried it before. “Hello, support?”

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Friday puzzle: McNuggets

Posted on June 26, 2009 by paulmcl

Last week’s puzzle was to calculate the resistance between opposite corners of a cube of identical resistors. Let’s assume they are all 1Ω since it doesn’t really matter. The key insight with this and many such problems is to find points that you know must have the same voltage (by symmetry) but which aren’t joined. You can add extra wires to join them without changing the value of the overall resistance since no current will flow in the extra wires, but they may make the calculation easier. The three corners near one terminal corner are all the same voltage, by symmetry, so consider them joined. Similarly for the three corners near the other terminal corner. This reduces the circuit to the considerably simpler one with 3 1Ω resistors in parallel, followed by 6 1Ω resistors in parallel, followed by another 3 1Ω resistors in parallel. Calculate that out and you get 5/6 Ω.

McDonald’s sells chicken McNuggets in boxes of 6, 9 and 20. So you can buy 15 McNuggets by buying a box of 6 and a box of 9. But if you try you’ll find that there’s no way to buy 16. What’s the largest number of McNuggets that you can’t buy?

Answer next Friday.

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Cadence, Avant!, SPC and Mitch

Posted on June 26, 2009 by paulmcl

The big picture story of Cadence and Avant! is well known. Some Cadence employees left to create Avant! (initially called Arcsys) and stole Cadence source code. Cadence told the district attorney, Avant! was raided, and after several years delay, everyone plead guilty and got varying sentences. Avant! was acquired by Synopsys and paid Cadence a large settlement.

But inside the big picture is rather amusing smaller story.

Mitch Igusa was the employee of Cadence who packaged up a lot of the source code of the place and route database Symbad, wrote it into a file called byebye.tar and emailed it to himself at home. Then he resigned from Cadence and went off to be a “consultant,” setting up an office one block from Avant! (then still called Arcsys).

Mitch was never an Avant! employee but apparently was paid by an Avant! executive out of a shell company set up and controlled by some of the other Avant! executives. Anyway, eventually his home got raided, and a hard disk full of Cadence source code was found, stripped of Cadence copyright, and in the process of being modified.

His case got wrapped up with all the other Avant! cases and, as is well-known, Avant! managed to delay legal action for years at the same time as they built up a big place and route business and used the money to acquire several other companies (full disclosure: including Compass where I was CEO at the time). Eventually, Mitch’s case came to trial ahead of the others, he pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to one year’s jail time (the other Avant! executive waited until the last possible moment and then pleaded guilty on the eve of the trial).

Now the story starts to get even more complicated. Because during the years of delay, Mitch Igusa had co-founded and was the chief architect at Silicon Perspective. The company managed to convince the judge that it would collapse without Mitch and so he was allowed to “participate in a work-release program.” That doesn’t sound very significant but in fact it meant that during the day Mitch Igusa would go to Silicon Perspective and program, and in the evening he’d go off back to jail until the following morning.

Meanwhile, Cadence’s floorplanning and placement technology had fallen behind in the market and a new market leader was starting to dominate the space. Yes, it was Silicon Perspective.

Eventually Cadence acquired Silicon Perpective. Cadence made the mistake of not putting a cap on the earnout portion of the acquisition, apparently meaning it ended up being an acquisition at nearly a billion dollars. Since then no EDA acqisition has had an unlimited earnout. But I digress. For obvious reasons, Cadence didn’t really want Mitch Igusa back on the payroll, of course. Initially, the story goes, he was positioned as being disposable, so it wasn’t a deal-breaker. But as the deal got closer it became apparent he was essential. After all, he was the chief architect of the product so a bit hard to do without. So he continued to “work at Silicon Perspective post-acquisition,” as Lavi Lev, then the exec VP of Cadence, put it. That is to say he worked back at Cadence again.

So apparently there was a period of time when Mitch Igusa would come into work at Cadence during the day writing Cadence physical design code, and then in the evening he’d go back to jail to serve his sentence for stealing…Cadence physical design code. If it happened in a screenplay, you’d think the writer was being a bit unrealistic.

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